Earlier this week, the FCC, “lead” by Ajit Pai voted to repeal its policy of Net Neutrality. The policy was put into place in Feb 2015 after the FCC (at the time under the Obama administration) made the decision to classify ISPs as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. For a lot of people (myself included for a while), this doesn’t make a lot of sense what any of this means so let me try to take a few minutes to explain (at least my understanding of it).

This morning, I was going through the Army Times early bird and came across an article called Army offers direct commissions to boost cyber force. Talk about this came out initially a few months ago. Like many ideas, I think it’s a good idea but probably not one that is fully thought out.

First, let me say congrats the the 675 CW2(P), 375 CW3(P), and 70 CW4(P) that were announced today after a very long long long wait for the release of the list. As someone who was looked at this year, I can say personally that the wait has sucked although I have absolutely enjoyed all of the memes showing up on Facebook (we have got some very creative warrants out there with apparently to much free time on their hands).

So I know it’s a few days late (what can I say, I was getting ready for a turkey comma) but I wanted to take a minute to congratulate the Army’s newest cyber warrant officers (ya I’m still signal but I play cyber during the day). So with that being said congrats to:

Many of us remember playing capture the flag (CTF) back when we were kids. The idea was to divide into teams, try to sneak to the other teams side and capture their flag. Years later, this idea was expanded on when Playstation and XBox started putting together multiplayer games that had the same general idea. More recently, the idea has morphed once again with hacking and computer security related CTF competitions. Perhaps the most famous CTF is the annual Defcon CTF where participants from around the world work to qualify to take part in the event at the conference itself, but this is just one of countless CTF competitions that take place on nearly a daily basis.

So when I last left you guys I was attending Splunk .conf. My plan was to write each day but I quickly realized how long the day was when you included 9 hours of conference, plus commuting to and from DC each day so screw that.

So today was day one of Splunk .conf2017. This being my first time at .conf, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The morning started off with the keynote address by the CEO of Splunk, Doug Merritt. A couple of interesting numbers to start with. 7,187 people were regestered to attend .conf this year from 65 countries who traveled a combined 65 million miles to get to Washington DC (enough miles to go to and from the moon over 100 times).

Today was the first (well sort of) day of the 8th annual Splunk .conf convention here in DC. .conf covers a range of topics, is three days (well really 2.5) long, has over 200 technical sessions, and includes over 6,000 participants. In short, its a bit of a data science nerd orgie.

A while back I wrote about the importance of using a standardized time source. Keeping accurate time across devices is essential so that you can easily correlate events within logs across the network. But what do you do when you’re operating on a closed network and there is no time source that you can pull from?

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Troy Ward
TheSignalChief@gmail.com